My Gazpacho

This is a recipe for my sister and for friends and for all others with no time. I made this in under 10 minutes. Most recipes for Gazpacho call for peeled and seeded tomatoes. I ignored this advice. After all, I eat the whole tomato all the time.

Gazpacho is a classic Spanish cold vegetable soup.( I have seen it described as a "liquid salad".)It is cooling and spicy- a good lunch to be eaten al fresco on a warm Tennessee spring day.It requires:

3 tomatoes. I like the ones that are sold as a family group of four still attached to their vines.

1/2 of an Armenian or hothouse cucumber, unpeeled, or 2 or three little conventional cucumbers, peeled.

2 slices of a good white bread, with crusts removed.

Sea salt to taste.

2 large garlic cloves, put through a garlic press.

2 tablespoons olive oil

1-2 tablespoons of red wine vinegar


Cut the tomatoes into quarters, after cutting away the stem end.Put the tomatoes in the food processor, along with the cucumber, which you have cut into several pieces. Add the garlic, and the red wine vinegar. Cut up the bread slices into cubes or tear it with your hands. Add it to the food processor. Pulse everything until it looks like the liquid salad it is meant to be. Now add the sea salt to your taste, and even a bit more vinegar, if you like. It is ready for lunch now. This yields 2 or 3 servings.

Some Gazpacho recipes call for adding a green bell pepper. I will add one when I have one. The other variation I want to try comes from "The South America Table" by Maria Baez Kijac. A Spanish chef in Madrid gave her his secret- he added a roasted red pepper to his Gazpacho. I will mention that Kijac adds water to her recipe. To make it soupier I suppose. I believe that this dish may have a hundred variations, and they are probably all good.